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The files that never get billed are almost never the ones you forgot. They are the ones you meant to get to. Billing does not fail because you lack discipline. It fails because it has no home on your calendar, so it competes with every deadline, and deadlines win. The fix is simple and it works: give the close a fixed slot, run the same short checklist, and finish it in one sitting.
What follows is a routine built for a solo or a small firm without a dedicated bookkeeper. It fits in an afternoon. Do it the same way every month and it becomes quick and predictable rather than something you keep putting off.
Block the Same Afternoon Every Month
Pick a day and defend it. The last business day of the month is tidy in theory, but it collides with everyone else's deadlines. I prefer the first or second business day of the new month, when the prior month is fully closed and nothing new has landed yet. Whatever you choose, make it recurring, mark yourself unavailable, and treat it like a client meeting you cannot move.
Three hours is usually enough for a small caseload. Turn off email. Put your phone in a drawer. The whole point of a routine is that you are not deciding what to do next; you are just working the list. If you want the deeper argument for why this beats billing in scattered five-minute bursts, my colleagues have written it up on the Billing and Trust hub.
Tip. Batch your close for the same time you run your trust reconciliation. The two tasks share the same mindset and the same open files, so you save the cost of switching contexts twice.
Clear Unbilled Time First
Start where the money hides. Open your work-in-progress and look for time that is entered but not yet on a bill. This is the single most common leak in a small practice, and it is the easiest to plug. Go file by file:
- Enter any time that is still living in a notebook, a phone note, or your memory. Reconstruct it honestly while the week is fresh.
- Confirm every entry has a rate, a date, and a task or matter attached. Orphaned time does not bill.
- Flag anything you know you will write down before it goes out, so the decision is made once, not twice.
Do this before you look at a single draft invoice. A draft built on incomplete time is a draft you will have to redo. If your work-in-progress report is telling you things you have been ignoring, this companion piece on reading the WIP report and acting on it is worth ten minutes.
Review Draft Bills Against Reality
Now generate the drafts and read each one as if you were the client receiving it. Not as the lawyer who did the work, but as the person who has to open the envelope and decide whether it feels fair. Two questions carry most of the weight:
- Does the narrative describe work the client will recognize? Vague lines like "attend to matter" invite disputes. Specific lines like "review disclosure and prepare questions for examination" close them.
- Is the total in line with what you signalled along the way? A number that arrives with no warning is the number that gets challenged.
Make your write-downs here, deliberately, not in a panic when someone calls. A modest reduction you chose is cheaper than a fee dispute you did not. Good narratives are a skill worth building; there is a whole post on writing narratives clients do not question.
A number that arrives with no warning is the number that gets challenged. Marc Lefebvre
Apply Trust and Send in One Pass
Here is where solos lose momentum: they approve the bills, then leave trust for "later," and later never comes. Do it in the same pass. For every client whose retainer covers all or part of the bill, apply the trust transfer at the moment you approve the invoice, and follow your jurisdiction's rules for notice and timing to the letter.
Careful. You cannot transfer from trust to general on account of fees until the client has been billed, and the exact notice and timing rules vary by law society. Confirm your province's requirements and apply them the same way every month. When in doubt, the knowledge base and your law society's trust guidance are the place to check.
Then send. All of them, in one go, before you stand up. Approved but unsent invoices are just unbilled time with an extra step remaining. If a bill draws on trust in a way that leaves the account short, stop and read managing a trust shortage the right way before you do anything else.
Note What to Fix Before Next Month
You will notice patterns while you work. The client who never has enough in trust. The matter where your time entries are always thin. The disbursement that slipped through unrecorded again. Do not fix them today. Just write them down, one line each, at the bottom of your list.
Next month, spend the first fifteen minutes on that note before you start. This is the compounding part of the routine: each close makes the next one shorter, because the recurring leaks get sealed one at a time. Disbursement tracking alone tends to recover real money once you make it a habit.
| Step | Rough time | What "done" looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Clear unbilled time | 45 min | WIP shows nothing entered but unbilled without a reason |
| Review draft bills | 60 min | Every narrative reads clean; write-downs made on purpose |
| Apply trust and send | 30 min | Transfers recorded, invoices out, nothing sitting in a folder |
| Note fixes for next time | 15 min | One line per recurring leak, ready for next month |
None of this requires a new system, though having your time, invoices, and trust in one place instead of three does make the afternoon shorter, which is part of why we built the billing side of A1 CMS the way we did. The tool matters less than the habit. Block the afternoon, work the list top to bottom, finish in one sitting. Do it three times and you will not go back.
